Tuesday, July 25, 2017

The most common passage people ask
me to read at their weddings is 1 Corinthians 13: Love is patient, love is kind
… love never ends. For obvious reasons, it makes a good text for folks starting
out in marriage together, as the apostle Paul calls us to love in a way that
puts the other before the self, always. Of course, I remind folks when I’m
talking to them about this text that Paul wasn’t talking about love in a way
that was meant only for married couples to share. Paul actually wants us to
love everyone in this selfless way,
not just spouses!

One of the next most-popular verses for weddings comes from our text for
today. “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where
you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my
people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me
from you!” Often, when I’m sharing with couples possible verses for their
wedding, I’ll read this passage, and the couple will say, “Yes, that’s the one,
that’s the passage we want.” And then I have to explain that again, this text
isn’t about love between spouses. This text describes the relationship between
a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. It’s unusual, certainly. Still, though,
most couples I meet with recognize that this kind of devotion and commitment is
indeed something they want to find in their married life together.

So what is the story of Ruth and Naomi? The opening verses tell us that
Ruth’s story is set in the time of the judges, the time period we talked about
last Sunday, between the Israelites coming into the Promised Land and the time
when they were ruled by earthly kings. During this time, there is a famine in
the land, and a man from Bethlehem – yes, that
Bethlehem – leaves Judah to go live in Moab. Bethlehem literally means
“house of bread,” and biblical authors were not blind to irony, certainly.
There’s a famine in the House of Bread. So this man Elimelech from Bethlehem
leaves to live in Moab with his wife, Naomi and his two sons, Mahlon and
Chilion. Mahlon and Chilion’s names mean literally “diseased” and “dying.” Yes,
this is biblical foreshadowing! Mahlon and Chilion marry women from among the
Moabite people. The Moabites haves a common heritage with the Israelites, but
they are a different nation, with different religious traditions. They worship
different gods than the Israelites. The Moabite women are named Ruth and Orpah
(not Oprah!) But after about 10 years in Moab, Elimelech, Mahlon, and Chilion
all die. Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah are all left widows.

Naomi, an Israelite, hears that at
last there is food in her homeland again – the famine has ended, and people are
saying that “God has considered” the people and their plight. She sets out with
her daughters-in-law to head back to where she was living before she left home
with her husband. She, Ruth, and Orpah are vulnerable, at risk as widows in a
patriarchal society. They have little to no social standing as they are, no one
to provide for them, few legal protections. And as Naomi thinks on that, she
encourages Ruth and Orpah to return to their families in Moab, to find security
in the home of a new husband. “Go back each of you to your mother’s house,” she
says, “May God deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with
me.” They weep together, and both women say they will stay with Naomi. But
Naomi insists she cannot provide for them. If Naomi were to remarry and have
more sons – could her daughters-in-law wait until they were grown to marry
them? Of course not. It would be foolish for them to not remarry. Naomi feels
like God has turned against her. Her husband and sons have died. In a culture
where a family line means so much, Naomi feels bitter, like a failure. In fact
she will eventually adopt the name Mara for herself, which means bitter. Orpah decides
to go back to Moab. But Ruth still chooses to remain with Naomi. And that’s
when she says the words that are a vow, a commitment: I will follow you. I’m
going where you’re going. I’m making my home where you’re making your home. I’m
making your people my people. I’m choosing your God as my God. And if I don’t
honor this vow, let God do to me what God will!

Ruth honors her vow, and she and Naomi return to Naomi’s
home, where Naomi works hard to secure a good life for Ruth, and where Ruth
remains focused on making sure Naomi is cared for too. Naomi helps Ruth connect
to a kinsman, Boaz, who fulfills his role as “redeemer,” for the family line,
marrying Ruth. And when Ruth gives birth to a child, Obed, Naomi serves as wet
nurse. The women of Naomi’s community say to her: “Blessed be the Lord, who has
not left you this day without next-of-kin … He shall be to you a restorer of
life … for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven
sons, has borne [a son].” They say of the baby Obed, “A son has been born to
Naomi.” Our reading closes with the author letting us know that Obed becomes
the father of Jesse, father to David, most beloved of the kings of Israel.

The Book of Ruth is a favorite book of many Bible readers.
After all, compared with the violence of war and Jael and her tent peg we read
about last week, Ruth’s story has a lot to recommend it. No wars. A bit of
romance. A story of devotion and commitment. A young woman, devoted to her
mother-in-law. A man willing to step up and protect those who are vulnerable. But
even though the story is drastically different than last week’s, our driving
question still is the same: what’s the good news in the Book of Ruth? Some
biblical scholars think Ruth was written to counter books of the Bible like
Ezra and Nehemiah, which include serious statements against intermarriage, a marriage
between Israelites and people of other faith traditions. Here is Ruth, a
non-Israelite, who nonetheless commits her life to following the God of Israel,
who becomes the great-grandmother of King David. And certainly, I think there’s
something to the hopefully-now-unsurprising fact that God works through the
story of an unexpected figure like Ruth. We talked last week about God using
unexpected people to accomplish God’s work. Here, we find a Moabite, a foreign
woman, a refugee, a widow, and her commitment Naomi leads to her being the
right person at God’s right time to continue God’s covenant for generations to
come. Phyllis Trible (1) notes that Ruth’s story is a bit like Abraham’s story
in the degree of their radical life-changing decisions. Both leave home and
country to go to a completely new place. Abraham has an explicit call from God
to do so. Ruth doesn’t have an explicit call from God. But throughout the text,
Naomi and Boaz both note that Ruth behaves with loving-kindness. The word has a
sense of practicing loving-kindness toward someone even when they have no
rightful claim on your compassion. The call on Ruth’s life that drives her to a
new place is the call of loving-kindness, of compassion, and it changes her
life as much as God’s more direct call changes Abraham’s.

But I am most moved by Ruth and Naomi’s move forward in spite of what can only feel
like utter disaster and failure in their lives. For Naomi, everything is lost.
Where once she had a whole family, now she will have no descendants at all. For
Ruth, though, there’s an escape plan. She can leave. This wouldn’t do anything
for Naomi, but for Ruth, how easy would it be to just go back home and start
over again? I don’t mean to malign Orpah’s decision. It was certainly a
sensible choice, and Naomi didn’t seem to begrudge her path. But what on earth
motivates Ruth to persevere and stay with Naomi despite what seems like a dead
end?

Samuel Wells preached on this passage at a Baccalaureate
service at Duke several years ago (2), and it struck me as an odd choice of
text at first. But Wells in his message speaks to the students about failure
that will inevitably be part of their lives. He writes, “I’m thinking right now
of young man who left college 10 years ago. He went into consulting work on the
East Coast. He spent a bit of time on Wall Street, and … [three] or four years
ago he and a couple of others set up their own company. It was tough at first
but soon it became quite a success … That company was his life, his identity,
his pride, his joy.

“January just past it all went wrong. The company slid into
bankruptcy like a sandcastle engulfed by the incoming tide. The young man saw
his dream disappear and his security, prestige, and self-esteem melt away with
it. Four months later, to my knowledge, his mother and sister have yet to find
a way even gently to refer to the subject with him. His life is shrouded in
silence and dominated by the f-word: failure.”

Wells continues, saying that in our culture, where we judge
and are judged constantly, there are “a thousand ways to fail. We come to fear
earthly failure in the same way we fear death -- in fact failure becomes a kind
of equivalent of death -- which is why the young man’s mother and sister found
they couldn’t even mention the subject to him. Our earthly successes become our
quest for immortality, and if we fail, it’s like a double dose of death.”

But Ruth, in the face of “poverty and possible death says
that, for her, there’s something that means more than self-preservation and
survival. That something is loyalty and love. In showing such steadfast love
against all expectations, she shows us the face of God in a way we might never
have seen it if she’d been lucky and successful.” It’s the same perseverance
that we find in Christ’s death, and the ultimate victory of life over death.
Who would continue to have hope after the seeming failure of Jesus’ death on
the cross?

While Wells was spending time in
Northern Ireland, he spoke with a priest there who had dedicated his life to
working for peace after decades of strife and violence. The priest had
experienced failure after failure. But he persisted, dedicated to his work. He
told Wells, “It’s better to fail in a cause that will finally succeed than to
succeed in a cause that will finally fail.”

Ruth and Naomi experience utter
devastation. But they bind themselves to each other, and to a path with God’s
people that will last them beyond the hopelessness of their present
circumstances. I can only imagine that when Ruth makes her decision to stay
with Naomi, she makes her choice not only out of loving-kindness, but also with
her eyes set on the horizon, into a future longer than her immediate suffering,
into a plan and path that is grander than she can see in that moment.

What about us? What is God’s call to
us in the midst our failures, in the midst of our suffering? Without a doubt,
we will encounter times in our lives, seasons when it feels like we have come
to a dead end, and the only thing we can do is go back to the beginning and
start all over. When we find ourselves in such a place, what will we do? Like
Ruth, maybe we can turn our pain into compassion, into loving-kindness that
keeps us thinking of others instead of ourselves, even in our pain. And like
Ruth, we can remember that we have committed our lives to serving God’s cause,
and even when we are failing, God’s
cause is the one that finally succeeds. Let’s stick with that path, even if we
can’t see that far down the road just yet.

Remember, I told you that Naomi
asked to be called Mara, which means bitter? No one ever calls her that.
Because the bitterness is for a season. The toughest season of her life. But Naomi means pleasure. And through Ruth’s
loving-kindness, Naomi holds a child in her arms that brings her joy beyond the
future she could see. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Today we’re turning our
attention to the book of Judges as we continue to explore the stories of some
of the women of the Bible. This book represents the story of Israel between the
time in which the Israelites moved into the Promised Land after the death of
Moses, and the time when Israel began to be ruled by earthly kings, as other
nations were. In the interim period, somewhere around the 12th or 11th
century BC, they were ruled by judges. They served two functions: the first was
like the role of judges today. These leaders settled legal disputes for the
Israelites. But the biblical judges also served as military leaders. They were
commanders-in-chief of Israel’s army.

The Book of Judges provides
us with glimpses of the leadership of these judges and into the hearts of the
Israelites. According to the author, the people and their leaders seem to go
through these repeated cycles where they are “do[ing] evil in the sight of the
Lord.” Over and over, the people seem to make the same mistakes, seem to turn
away from their faithful God, seem to do the very things that they know have
always resulted in pain and heartbreak in the past. If you know any stories
from the book of Judges, it might be the story of Samson and Delilah. Samson
was one of the judges of Israel. But I’m guessing that the story of Deborah and
Barak and Jael is new or unfamiliar to many of you.

Deborah, the fourth of the
twelve judges in this time period, follows one of these time periods of
wandering away from God. The opening verses of chapter 4 tell us that the
Israelites were doing what was evil in God’s eyes, and their actions resulted
in their being sold into the hand of King Jabin. The commander of Jabin’s army
is a man named Sisera, who commands a fierce army of nine-hundred chariots of
iron. For twenty years, King Jabin oppresses the Israelites. We don’t know
exactly what this oppression looks like, but it’s a long enough time to be
feeling pretty desperate and downtrodden. Twenty years of cruelty.

Into this setting, Deborah
rises as judge of Israel. She is called a prophet, a title not given to the
other judges, and a title only given to a handful of women in the scriptures –
a little study project for you to track down other women prophets in the
scripture! A prophet hears God’s voice and speaks God’s message to the people.
When our scene opens, Deborah summons Barak, a military commander, and tells
him: God commands you to take 10,000 soldiers from the tribes of Israel to
fight against Sisera and his army, and God will give them into your hand. Barak
responds saying to Deborah, “If you go with me, I will go. If you will not go
with me, I will not go.” It’s unclear why he responds this way. You could think
of his words as flattering – he wants Deborah’s wisdom and leadership there
with him in the battle. Or you can think of him as skeptical, doubting
Deborah’s words, or God’s words, or fearful, unwilling to step up and lead on
his own. Deborah agrees to go with him, but perhaps because of his reluctance
to just lead as God had called him to, she tells him that the glory of the
journey, the victory will not fall to Barak, but to a woman.

As the battle unfolds,
Deborah sends Barak out saying, “The Lord is indeed going out before you.”
Sisera’s chariot are thrown into a panic – later in Judges we find that storm
has caused all the chariot wheels to get stuck in mud, rendering them useless.
And the army of King Jabin is being steadily conquered. When Sisera, the commander,
sees this, he runs away. He flees and seeks safety in the tent of Jael, the
wife of a man named Heber. Heber is part of a clan of people called Kenites,
and they are allies with both King Jabin and
Israel. Sisera expects welcome, and indeed, Jael tells him, “Have no fear.”
She covers him with a rug, and gives the thirsty man a drink of milk. He asks
her to guard the entrance of the tent and to turn away anyone who approaches.
And then he fall asleep. And Jael takes a tent-peg and hammer and drives the tent-peg
through his skull, killing him as he sleeps. Barak shows up at her tent, only
to find his foe already defeated – by the woman Jael.

After the battle, Deborah
and Barak raise their voices in a song Deborah composes, saying, “Hear, give
your ear, I will sing to the Lord, I will make a melody to God.” The song that
they sing is thought to be some of the oldest material in the entire Bible, and
recounts in dramatic fashion all the events that have unfolded, naming Deborah
a Mother of Israel.

So, what do we make of this
intense, crazy story? Weeks ago, I was seeking advice from colleagues about
what hymns might be suitable to go along with this scripture text. And of my
colleagues responded saying that it depended on what the “good news” was that I
planned to share from this passage. That was such a helpful focusing question
because my first response was to think, “Wait, where is the good news in this story?” I’ve wanted to share with you some
of the stories of women in the Bible, since their stories are often overlooked.
But is there any good news in this vividly gory story?

Perhaps the good news is in
the victory: the Israelites were freed from their oppression through Deborah’s
leadership, Barak’s military action, and Jael’s, well, decisive actions. After
these events, Israel experiences a peace under Deborah’s judgeship that lasts
for forty years, a meaningful duration of time in the scriptures. Is that
enough good news for this story? One of the struggles I often hear folks
express when reading through the Hebrew Bible, the stories in the Old Testament
is about the level of violence that takes place that gets attached to God’s
name. I’m glad people are so
uncomfortable with it. I’m glad we don’t read story after story of war and
violence and wonder if that could really be God’s plan. It would be worse if we
didn’t raise such ethical questions.
They are contemporary questions after all: Is there such a thing as just war? Does God choose “sides” in a
war? Is God with one side and not the other? We can think of the religious
crusades of history, of action and inaction during World War II, of turmoil
over our role in Vietnam to more contemporary questions: What is the right
response to genocide, like in Rwanda in the 90s? How do we respond to war and
destruction in Syria? Rev. Alex Joyner writes that there’s a monster in the
story of Deborah and Jael. It’s not Jael, not Sisera, but the monster of
violence. He says, “But there's still that monster, isn't there? The monster
that stalks our streets and our homes and our relationships even today. There's
still that monster. The monster of violence can never have the last word -- not
on a hill called Calvary and not here." (1) Can we give thanks for freedom
from oppression, even while we lament the violent means that brought about this
new peace for Israel? I think, at least, it is good news when we faithfully
wrestle with texts like this, because we’re paying attention, we’re searching,
and seeking God’s wisdom and clarity, and realizing how contemporary this
ancient story is, how God’s word is a living word.

Perhaps we find some good
news in the fact that this story is yet another testament to the fact that God
surprises us, uses unexpected people, works in unexpected, mysterious ways.
There are very few one-dimensional “hero” figures in the scriptures, even if we
thoughtfully like to gloss over the less savory parts of the stories of
biblical figures. At our animate faith study this spring, we talked about a
phrase reformer Martin Luther used – “simultaneously sinners and saints.”
Sometimes we think of God’s followers in the Bible as a bunch of saints. And
they are that, but they’re sinners
too, struggling and sometimes failing to do what God desires. Deborah, in her
victory song, gloats, taunting Sisera’s mother, saying she’ll watch for her son
who is never coming home. Jael – she helped deliver Israel – but she had to
take some questionable actions to do it, certainly disregarding concepts of
hospitality and sanctuary. I’m thankful for these women, these complex women,
who aren’t painted as perfect by any stretch. But God doesn’t look for perfect.
God perfects us as we learn to love
and serve God over our lifetime. And so God can use people as complicated as
Deborah and Barak and Jael, and draw good out of the messes we make, when our
motives and actions are less than God desires for us.

And we find good news in
this: God is faithful, offering us redemption again and again, offering us
paths to freedom even when our captivity was a result of our own destructive
choices, present with us even when we doubt God’s plan, surprising us even when
we sure we’ve got it all figure out, giving us grace even, perhaps especially
when it is undeserved. Deborah and Jael and Barak are part of a compellingly
strange story, but it is one story of many in this long cycle of judges, and
one story of many in our long story of turning away from God who never turns
away from us, and one story of many where we fail to see God’s constancy
through victory and failure. Thank God for unsettling stories, and God’s
consistent grace within and throughout them. Amen.

Wednesday, July 05, 2017

Time is such a funny thing. It rules
our lives in so many ways. We’re governed by time, appointments to get to,
schedules to be kept, not enough time to do what we want, time wasted. Time
that seems to drag too slowly for us, and time that rushes by. Today is my
one-year anniversary of being the pastor here, and people sometimes ask me,
“Does it seem like a long time?” In some ways, I can hardly believe it has been
a year already. I can vividly remember my first day as pastor here last year,
which was the last day of Vacation Bible School that year. It was really hot –
as was most of the summer. And I got a flat tire that day. I can tell you what
I was wearing, and I can remember some of the people I met at VBS, and I
remember struggling to learn all the new names and faces I was encountering. It
seems like just a moment ago. But it also seems like a long time, too. I don’t
feel like your “new” pastor. I feel like we’ve been in ministry together for a
long time, like we’ve been working together on this following Jesus thing for a
long time now.

In my first religion class in undergrad, I learned what is
still one of my favorite theological concepts: Kairos. There are two common
words for time in the scripture: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is the Greek word
for our regular, ordinary, everyday time. Our human time. The seconds, the
minutes, the hours, the days moving just as they do. But kairos – kairos is
time in a different way. Kairos is God’s time – specifically, “God’s right time
for action.” Usually the word “chronos” is used in Greek texts to talk about
time. But in the gospels, for example, this “kairos” – God’s right time for
action – is used more often than chronos – regular time. And that makes sense,
because the scriptures are full of stories about God’s right time for things to
happen. Kairos. God’s right time for action.

Can you think of a promise someone
made you that took a really long time to come to fruition? Or plans that you
made that were in the far-distant future, and you had to wait, and wait, and
wait for the day to arrive when your plans would become reality? Today, as we
start our summer series of looking at some of the stories of the women of the
Bible, we encounter Sarah and Abraham. Sarah and Abraham started out as Sarai
and Abram, but God gave them new names, a sign of the covenant God was making
with them. When Abram was seventy-five years old, and Sarai was in her
mid-sixties, God spoke to Abram, told him to leave his home and travel to a new
land that God would point out, and there promised Abram that God would bless
him, make of him and his descendants a great nation. Today, we read about the
fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham and Sarah when Sarah learns that she
will give birth to a son. By the time Sarah delivers her child, Isaac, Abraham
is one hundred, and she is ninety-one years old. Twenty-five years pass between
God making a promise to them and when the promise is fulfilled. Twenty-five
years for it to be “God’s right time.”

Today’s first text opens with God
appearing to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre, where Abraham’s tent is. This is a
holy place – it is at this place where Abraham earlier built an altar when God
renewed the covenant with Abraham and Sarah and gave them their new names. God
appears in the form of three men, messengers of God. And Abraham, seeing them,
immediately makes arrangements for their welcome. He has their feet washed,
invites them to rest, brings them water, and has Sarah make them cakes from
choice flour. Often, in fact, this passage is cited as a text that leads us to
think about hospitality and how we welcome strangers into our midst. But today,
I’m more interested in the message these men bring.

“Where is Sarah?” they ask. “Sarah
is in the tent,” Abraham answers. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Sarah and
Abraham had been told by God that Abraham would be blessed with descendants
more numerous than the stars. After more than ten years of waiting on God’s
promise, Sarah took matters into her own hands. She told Abraham to have a
child by Sarah’s slave, a young woman named Hagar, so that at least Abraham’s
line would continue, even if not through Sarah. This is the best way Sarah can
figure out how to make God’s promise come true. And indeed, Hagar has a son by
Abraham named Ishmael. We’ll come back to that in a bit. Then, another decade
and a half pass until we reach today’s scene. “In due season,” one of the men
says, “Sarah will have a son.” Sarah is listening from the tent, and she laughs when she hears this news. She’s
not laughing happy, joyful laughter. She’s laughing her disbelief, her
skepticism, her disappointment. She is ninety years old. She is in menopause.
She has already secured a son for Abraham. She has waited two and half decades
on God’s promises. “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have
pleasure?” she wonders. She thinks that God, in the form of these three
visitors, has lost it.

God says to Abraham, “Why did she
laugh?” Why did she express doubt? “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?
This is going to happen.” Suddenly,
Sarah wants to deny laughing, fearful of God’s response, and in my favorite
line, God responds, “Oh yes, you did laugh!” It’s like two children arguing:
“Nuh-uh.” “Yuh-huh.” Beyond today’s passage, we find that indeed, God “deals
with Sarah” as said, and God does for Sarah what has been promised, at God’s
right time, twenty-five years later. Sarah’s son is named Isaac, which comes
from the word “to laugh,” for, Sarah says, “God has brought laughter for me,
and everyone who hears will laugh with me.” Her laughter, once the laughter of
bitter doubt and disappointment, has been transformed into joyous laughter at
last.

Is anything too wonderful for the
Lord? Throughout the scriptures, we hear similar sentiments. With God, all
things are possible. Nothing is impossible with God. Do we believe it? Sarah
tried to fulfill God’s promises by her own actions, in her own way, in her own
time, and the results were not so good, which we’ll hear more about. Have you
ever found yourself trying to force God’s plan into your own plan? Into your
own sense of timing?

I remember while I was on sabbatical a few years ago, I was
trying to make some decisions about my next steps in ministry. I was trying to
listen to God’s voice, but I was impatient. Every year, pastors and churches
have to fill out paperwork expressing their hopes about ministry appointments
in the coming year. When I asked friends to pray for me, to pray for clarity
for me, I would ask them, “Please tell God to give me an answer by November 1st.
That’s when my paperwork is due!” Last year, when I was appointed to come here
to Gouverneur, it was most definitely not
my timing. I wasn’t ready to move. I wasn’t looking to move. And I can’t
say that Gouverneur was one of the places I had imagined myself serving as
pastor. And yet, here I have found blessing upon blessing, because it seems
that this has been God’s plan for us.
Is anything too wonderful for God? Of course not. We can say it with our lips.
But frustrated by God’s strange sense of timing, by God’s strange sense of
humor, by God’s dreams that seem impossible, we end up getting in the way of
the truly wonderful that God wants to
reveal to us at God’s just-right time. God is faithful, and God’s promises to
us are always, always fulfilled. Let
that knowledge fill our hearts with the laughter of deep joy.

***

There is another woman in the story
of God’s promises to make Abraham into a father of nations. As I mentioned,
when Sarah was not conceiving a child, she decided to take things into her own
hands. She gave her slave Hagar to Abraham, and Hagar gave birth to a son named
Ishmael. This isn’t a part of the story that often gets a lot of attention,
because it is all pretty uncomfortable, isn’t it? Hagar is a slave, and she has
no choice in what is happening to her, no option to give or withhold her
consent.

What is unusual, a blessing in its
own way, is that we get to hear some of Hagar’s story, even though she is a
woman, even though she is a slave
woman. We’ve been talking about God’s special care for the most vulnerable, and
Hagar qualifies on more than one account. Some chapters before we encounter
Hagar in Chapter 21, when Hagar became pregnant, the text tells us that Hagar
“looked with contempt on Sarah.” We don’t know exactly why this is, whether she
feels proud that she has been able to conceive, whether she’s hopeful that
bearing Abraham’s child will mean her freedom, whether she’s angry that she has
to be a parent on terms that were not her own. But because of Hagar’s contempt,
Sarah, with Abraham’s blessing, begins to treat Hagar harshly. Hagar runs away.
One of God’s messengers finds her in the wilderness, and tells her to return to
Abraham and Sarah, promising her, just as she has promised Abraham and Sarah,
that her offspring will be numerous, her descendants numbering more than a
multitude. The messenger tells her to name her child Ishmael, which means, “God
hears.” Hagar returns to Abraham and Sarah, and her child is born, and for a
while, everything seems ok.

Until Isaac, Sarah’s son is born.
Sarah sees Isaac and Ishmael playing together, and something seems to snap. She
tells Abraham to send Hagar and her son away. “The son of this slave woman
shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Abraham is reluctant, but God says
essentially that in both Isaac and Ishmael God’s promises will be fulfilled.
So, with some food and water, Hagar is sent away, and again, she finds herself
in the wilderness, this time with her son. God’s messenger finds her again,
when she is at her most desperate, believing that she is going to have to watch
her child starve to death. “Do not be afraid,” the messenger says, “God has
heard the voice of the boy. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast, for I will
make a great nation of him.” God opens her eyes to see a well of water, a sign
of life and hope. We read that Ishmael grows up in the wilderness, becoming an
expert with the bow, and God is with him. Yes, God fulfilled the promises made
to Abraham and Sarah, but God had promises for Hagar too, and was as faithful
to those promises as the ones that drive the “main” story of the scripture.

Uncle Bill has told me that when he
and my Aunt Shari were expecting my cousin Ben, their second oldest child,
Uncle Bill was filled with anxiety, sure that he would never be able to love
Ben as much as he loved his firstborn Bekah. But, with my grandfather
reassuring him, Uncle Bill discovered that his love would grow, would stretch,
would multiply, rather than be divided among his children.

Even though Sarah had just experienced
the fulfillment of her wildest dreams, her deepest joy, come true, it somehow
still wasn’t enough. She let herself be ruled by fear. It was as though she
were afraid that someone else having joy meant there would be less joy less for
Sarah, that God’s promises being fulfilled in Hagar would mean that promises to
Sarah would somehow be lost or ruined. Even though I believe we know better,
somehow, when it comes to God, God’s gifts for us, God’s promises to us, God’s
love and grace in our lives, we end up afraid that blessings for someone else
leaves less for us, as if God’s love needs to be divided among us, portioned
out. Sarah has gotten all that she could barely even hope to receive, and
somehow, she lets her blessings, her promises received seem like a meager
portion. God, though, is faithful, the God of Isaac and Ishmael, the God of Sarah and
Hagar.

When have you been Sarah, trying to
make God’s promises fit your own plans? When have you been Hagar, needing a
reminder that God will see you, hear you, be faithful to you, even when you
feel hopeless, lost in the wilderness? When have you been like Sarah to a
Hagar, worried that God has less left for you, because of the blessings another
receives? Nothing is too wonderful for our God to bring about, in God’s right
time, in God’s right way, in fulfillment of God’s faithful promises to us. Let
us open our hearts and lives to the wondrous ways that God wants to work in all
of us. Amen.